Two weeks out, and I haven’t felt this calm about a presidential election since the 1990s. I feel in my bones that everything will be okay (maybe because I can’t bear to think otherwise).
Did you know there’s a decent chance we’ll elect our first woman president in two week’s time? That possibility is real, and I’m every bit as excited about that aspect of Nov. 5 as I am about the possibility that the coalition of the sane will hold fascism at bay. Again.
I was pretty sure I’d never see this backward-ass sexist country elect a woman after the 2016 disaster. Following the 2020 primary, I was even more convinced of that. But after many twists and turns, here we are. Wow.
***
It looks like Bill, the dogs and I won’t be home before Election Day. The river hasn’t crested but is predicted to do so soon. The old timers who’ve trod this muddy path decades ago say it’s usually at least a couple of weeks after the crest before the water recedes.
Meanwhile, the dogs are fascinated by life in town, especially the constant parade of feral cats.
When we let the dogs out, they burst through the doorway in opposite directions to perform a perimeter check and ensure no cats are present.
A couple of times they’ve chased cats over the fence, but I’m pretty sure the felines are in no danger; they’re much quicker. If the dogs did manage to catch up with one, I suspect the cat would turn around and whup both their asses.
***
So here we are, two weeks out, uncertain about the future but putting our hopes — and efforts — into better days ahead. That’s all we can do.
Open thread!
Angel Match Updates and More
Baud
Same. I’m relatively calm. I feel like we’ve done our best and there’s not much else to do.
Kay
This post is such a gift, BC
thank you :)
Kosh III
“I suspect the cat would turn around and whup both their asses.”
I always laugh when I remember when I was a kid we had a cat who loved to torment a dog.
They would be on our high front porch, the cat would let the dog back it up to the edge of the porch, the cat would slap her claws over the dog’s nose.
The cat would jump off the high end of the porch, the dog would hesitate to jump, then run to the steps on the OTHER end of the porch to go chase the cat, which would by that time be safe and sound in a tree.
A Ghost to Most
We got this.
“Americans will always do the right thing, after exhausting all the alternatives.”
Attributed to Winston Churchill
WaterGirl
Love seeing the boys! And hearing your update. Looks like you got a good place to stay in town. Total luck or did you know someone?
*My dogs would not stay nearby if I let them out without a leash. Impressive.
Steve LaBonne
Ground game superiority – which Harris clearly has – is generally supposed to be worth a point or two, and in closely divided swing states that’s huge. And polls don’t measure it.
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
Not everyone is engaged, not everyone is able or positioned to do it, but GOTV work must continue until the polls close.
Sean
I wish I shared the calm, but, alas, I am sweating out the final 2 weeks in near perpetual misery. But, I’ve deliberately stayed away in an effort to not discourage anyone else. I’ve written my postcards, I’ve donated the most dollars I’ve ever committed in any election year. I will be voting early in the next day or so. I can’t control much else.
Trollhattan
Good to know House of Cracker is high (relatively) and dry (the important bit).
Meanwhile, in Texas, I learn their Railroad Commission no longer regulates [checks notes] railroads, but does regulate their energy extraction bidnez.
Mary
Bettty, Kamala raised $1 billion in 3 months. That means a lot more to me than the polls since a whole lot of that money was in small donations.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
Hopefully the polls are off beyond the ground game. They’re really the only somewhat negative information we have right now. I’m very curious to see how they match up to the final outcome.
lee
Some precincts in Texas reporting record turnout in early voting.
msnbc.com/katy-tur/watch/could-texas-turn-blue-what-to-expect-from-early-voting-this-year-2222997177…
Marmot
Ha! This keeps popping up in my mind too, behind a couple of other thoughts mostly focused on fighting fascism. Again.
ArchTeryx
I wish I could be so sanguine. I’m terrified. Not so much because I believe Harris is going to lose, but simply because the odds are impossible to calculate. And if she loses, I and everyone I love become refugees in our own country, and we’re living right next to a huge bunch of gun-toting MAGAts. I don’t normally advocate “arming up” but that’s what we’re doing as a just-in-case measure. Few of us would be accepted in other countries.
If Harris wins, of course, we’re all gonna go out and celebrate at a steakhouse, and breathe a GIANT sigh of relief. For at least 4 more years, we keep our Republic.
But the chances of her losing are unknown, and in this case, unknowns scare the SHIT out of us.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
Markos over at Teh Orange has written about this for a long time. He states that a real ground game superiority translates into 3 pts at the polls.
What I can’t remember is if that’s a state-by-state data point or simply nationally.
I’m confident we’ll win the popular vote easily. The Orange Fart Cloud will get electorally annihilated in reliably blue states and while sure, Harris will get the same in places like Alabama, more of us live blue than those who live red.
If the 3 Pt Ground Game Theory works state-by-state, then it’s a landslide in the EC.
Of course we’ve talked about Felonious D’s vote ceiling being around 47%. Anything under 45% for him, given the national situation we find ourselves in, would be a landslide.
Of course we can write the Pitchbot headline now if that happens:
“President-Elect Harris beat former President Trump by 5% points in the Popular Vote and the Electoral College by over 100 votes. This is how that will limit her legislative agenda once she takes office.”
Sure Lurkalot
Growing up on Long Island, a big, mean tom cat started hanging out on our corner lot. We were a petless family, so he became ours. We kids could stroke him on his forehead…dare not touch him anywhere else or you’d get “the claw”…but we called for him, he would come and we loved him just the same. But what really endeared him was the fact that no self-respecting dog would come anywhere near our lot such that, no shit, there was no shit in our grass, ever. Even my dad warmed up to him for that.
hrprogressive
I am not calm, because a fortnight between “Keep our flawed democracy” or “Slide into Fascist Hellscape” is not a good place to be.
That said, I feel Kamala has a real chance. Her campaign has excited people who absolutely were not excited about a second Biden term.
Although there are definitely a lot of sexist people who won’t vote for *any* woman, I think 2016 there were a lot of voters who just did not want to vote for that particular woman.
Hell, I did it in the general, but in both 2008 and 2016, I did not vote for her in the primaries.
Kamala compelled me to make weekly recurring donations till Election Day. Never done that, ever.
So.
I am torn between wanting to believe legitimate “the polling averages are trash because shit pollsters are juking the numbers” and wanting to avoid a 2016-style polling miss.
The big, big difference between 2016 and 2024…
Convicted Felon Donald Trump was “unknown” in terms of governing qualities in 2016.
A failed pandemic and an attempted Coup later, and people know exactly who he is now.
People are either voting for or against him based on that knowledge.
Which is all the more disquieting when you see just how many people either discounting who he is, or explicitly want what he’s selling.
So, yeah.
I think our chances are much better now with Kamala than Joe. So there’s that.
BeautifulPlumage
I went through some angst this weekend, but mailed the rest of my postcards yesterday, made a donation to one of the thermometers, and read some good news (the $$ Harris has raised, as Mary points out, and the fact that his highly-paid campaign managers let the clown play dress-up-and-pretend-to-make-fries with just brutal pictures as the result).
Hey, where’s Stevie 3-Shirts sleeping tonight? And Tina Peters, where will she be snoozing tonight?
Jerszy
I’m going to confess this here because I am not sharing it with any friends who may use it as an excuse to not bother to vote.
But I too am feeling confident. For the last 3 election cycles the polling has vastly underestimated blue turnout. Every Single Time. And this time, the stakes are EVEN MORE stark, clear, and crucial, and therefore we are the more fired up and ready to GOTV.
While it *seems* that this dynamic is already in our favor, then you have to add the not-at-all-insignificant number of ‘decent GOPers’ that are primed to vote for Harris, the secret-Harris GOP females AND the rightfully crawl-over-glass female post-Roe motivated blue females. The youth vote is far more pro-Harris than the number of Bro-voters that are Trump fans (who will sleep in on Election Day).
This ‘bandwagon’ BS the Trump pollsters are throwing out there will only serve to depress his vote, with them thinking ‘it’s already in the bag’. Add to this that the GOP has entirely outsourced their GOTV effort to the feckless novices of Kirk & Musk…. and we may have the making of a >10 point blowout blue wave.
But there’s NO WAY I’m saying all this to the friends, fam & colleagues that I WANT TO ENSURE TURN OUT and vote! But I wanted to put this positivity out there SOMEwhere for the record, and maybe encourage anyone really rattled rn.
Drunkenhausfrau
Thank you for such a positive message… greatly needed!
So glad to see the dogs and to know you are safe and well… Miss your wit on that hellscape that is Twitter. Leaving it as soon as this election is done…
Baud
I mean, we’re basically Schrodinger’s Cat in the box. We’re in a superposition of alive and dead, and our wavefunction will collapse in a couple of weeks one way or the other. Whatever the outcome, it won’t be a surprise like it was in 2016.
Baud
@Jerszy:
It’s a theory and a good one, but it doesn’t speak all that well of us that people on our side don’t instinctively want to pile on if we were shown to be clearly ahead.
RaflW
“I suspect the cat would turn around and whup both their asses.”
This is what JV Vance got so totally wrong in dissing ‘cat ladies’.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: As I said in the Walz thread, I’m sleeping through the night. I’ll take that as a good sign.
Jerszy
@Baud: That’s part of the point. We are not, now, “clearly” anything. Hence no ‘piling on’ effect to be had
We just need to be sleeves-up and working it, eyes on the prize.
Elizabelle
I am glad to hear that Badger and Pete have found a purpose to their lives, away from their riverside home.
Anoniminous
Unless all those tens of thousands of young black women who registered to vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania in order to vote for Harris decide to sit the election out she will take Michigan and Pennsylvania.
That’s 260.
Any of the squeaker Biden states: Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, puts her to 270.
(Yes, I’ve already said that this AM.)
OId Man Shadow
Yeah, I’m not doing well. I’m spiraling right now.
FastEdD
50.1% Everyone gets a puppy.
49.9% Diarrhea forever.
Come on puppies.
ArchTeryx
@Baud: You’re right in it won’t be a surprise. And that’s an excellent analogy – data is so corrupt and so unreliable who is ahead that it really is like a quantum wavefunction. In two weeks, the box is opened and it will collapse into something..
IIRC my quantum chemistry (yes, I took that course,) Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought exercise to try and describe a very complex phenomenon in simple terms. In the box the cat is both alive and dead – because we can’t actually predict the quanta until we observe it. And once we observe it, its state is fixed… and the act of observation can change what quanta it becomes. That’s the part everyone has trouble wrapping their head around. You don’t just open the box and get a live or dead cat – you literally create a living or dead cat just by looking in the box.
And that’s what we’ll be doing in the election. It isn’t just random chance that elects one or the other. We all will be trying to will that quanta to our side. Whoever’s will is greatest, wins.
lowtechcyclist
@Trollhattan:
In Paper Money, George Goodman, writing under his ‘Adam Smith’ pseudonym, describes how the Texas Railroad Commission indirectly inspired the creation of OPEC.
Baud
Via reddit, another white dude steps up.
RaflW
@lee: Wow, 90% of the early voters in an infographic from that report were said to be age 65 and up. Obviously he was out during daytime, many people’s work hours etc, but that’s some motivated older folks — generally the most reliable voters anyway, but still.
The gender split looked promising as well.
narya
I saw a bit of Cheney’s appearance with Harris in WI yesterday (MSNBC was running it last night), and I was genuinely impressed. Cheney’s work on the J6 committee, her actually campaigning for Harris, and her implacable opposition to the fascism that is trying to take over the country wins her points from me. Honestly, if I could sit down with anyone and really talk in-depth, in a never-to-be-public way, she would be near the top of my list. I have no clue what has motivated her–it’s not just naked ambition–and I truly wonder if her experience with Harris and with the Dem crowds welcoming her have moved her at all. I think it would be fascinating either way. She is outside her lifelong bubble; sometimes that makes people want to get back to their bubble ASAP, and other times it changes people. Even if she becomes part of the implacable opposition again, she’s still doing a service now.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: I was just wondering about him.
Baud
@ArchTeryx:
Right. We have some agency in influencing the outcome of the observation.
TooManyJens
@Baud: This is a good point. One of the things that appeals to uninformed and/or malinformed voters about Trump is his confidence. I wouldn’t say he projects strength, Christ no, but he does project “we’re the majority and we’re winning” whether it’s true or not, and so do his followers. Harris herself is confident, but Dems in general are very timid about our electoral chances and have been at least since losing 2004. Maybe getting out there and proclaiming that we’re winning would do us some good. We’re afraid it would make people complacent, but would it really? Or are we just afraid because we’re Democrats and elections freak us out?
zhena gogolia
@narya: It’s well worth watching the whole thing. Harris’s closing statement is inspiring.
lowtechcyclist
@hrprogressive:
When you wake up on the morning of Election Day 2016 and the guy who was then regarded as the leading expert on the polling says there’s a 30% chance that Trump wins, it’s not a polling miss when he wins. Just saying.
Sean
@OId Man Shadow:
You and me both. I’m sorry you’re feeling it and hope you find some calm moments where possible. I know it’s not easy.
Belafon
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: “President-Elect Harris fails to exceed expectations during election. Will that hinder the first woman president?”
ArchTeryx
@Baud: Let me tell you quantum mechanics, even at the surface level (like we did in chemistry with calculus) is best understood when you’re completely out of your mind on pot.
Quantum mechanics is weird, man. And so’s one side of this election. So’s the election itself. It’s not just scary, it’s completely weird.
Wapiti
@Sure Lurkalot: tthinking back on the years, it’s a bit mind boggling how common it was for people to let their dog shit on someone’s property and not clean it up. Still happens, but most people are more considerate around here.
Baud
@TooManyJens:
I don’t know. I know what I prefer, but I don’t know what maximizes turnout when the polls are within the margin of error.
I think it is generally true that voters are less likely to come out if the outcome is a forgone conclusion. That’s why a lot of people didn’t turn out for the Dem primary. But that leads to the other problem of people only caring about the president and ignoring other seats that are up.
ArchTeryx
@Wapiti: I’ve been known to package up the pile, put it in a paper bag, soak it in gasoline and light it on fire on their doorstep. That’s an extreme measure, but it sure as heck gets their attention.
Manyakitty
@Baud: far out.
Betsy
Great to hear your update. And thanks for the link back to your flood / weather event / home status report. That was so Betty Cracker of you, to know that some of us would be very interested even though we had been offline from the ol’ blog a couple of days here and there. You anticipated our need-to-know.
I’m chuckling at “sucks green gator balls.” Will think of this phrase next time I encounter a setback.
Continued wishes for your calm and well-being!
RandomMonster
Thank you for your calm and level-headed message, Betty. The prospect of our first Madam President is indeed the most exciting part of this election (that and, you know, preserving democracy).
I’m also looking forward to the day when a defeated and humiliated (and hopefully incarcerated) Trump mostly disappears from the headlines and we don’t have to think about that miserable garbage bag of transfats anymore.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Wapiti:
What pisses off people to no end here are people who “clean up after their dog”, then leave the little bag behind.
You see this on mountain trails, neighborhoods, etc.
It’s as if they think the little “dog shit bag fairy” is a real thing and will clean up after them. I’ve never caught somebody doing that but if I (or anybody else does), the person doing it would be eating the contents of the bag.
Baud
I think Harris knows best how well she’s doing and if she’s going to Texas, as someone in the morning thread mentioned, she’s feeling pretty confident about things elsewhere.
TBone
@Baud: 💜
TBone
@narya: what
@zhena gogolia: said.
The whole Maria Shriver interview was great. Well worth a watch, not overly long.
You Tube:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=wBxwwm56IBc
TooManyJens
@narya: I saw Doug Emhoff at a “Country Over Party” event yesterday. I was glad to see he wasn’t pitching kumbaya stuff about how we’re not so different, etc. The message was look, you don’t have to like our policies but this guy is an unfit, autocratic maniac so let’s join forces and stop him.
Side note: you can tell you’re in a room full of people who aren’t Very Online when one of the speakers refers to Republicans who hate what the party has become but won’t do anything about it as the “couch caucus,” and there’s not so much as a snicker from the crowd.
Betsy
@Baud: Here’s hoping the neck-and-neck headlines will brace up the smushy Michiganders who rightly want justice for Palestine but soft-headedly think that playing roulette with a national election is a tactic to … accomplish heaven knows what.
They really need to get a frickin’ grip!!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Steve LaBonne: Even where they do theoretically have a ground game, they have grifters sharing notes on how to get credit for door-knocking without actually doing the door-knocking.
Funny how in every single corner of the Party of Grift, from top to bottom, you find grifters. It’s hilarious.
Trollhattan
Liz Cheney frankly scares me, but damn if the woman doesn’t know how to bring the venom. She’s the spiritual descendant of Bar Bush, who got Nixon’s admiration for knowing “how to hate.”
Bam!
BC in Illinois
Early voting in Missouri.
I am about to enter the room, after 53 minutes in line.
Almost there.
PAM Dirac
@ArchTeryx:
When I was in grad school doing quantum calculations for my thesis, I found listening to he music of Charles Ives fit well with thinking about quantum stuff. No psychoactive substances involved. I guess I’m weird because the music of Ives and quantum theory always made more sense to me than Newton and Mozart.
narya
There was a snicker in my sunroom however–possibly even qualified as a guffaw.
NotMax
Thought I’d toss this into the mix.
“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”
— William Hazlitt
.
TaMara
@Baud: I literally said this to Bad Horse the other night.
I wish I was calm and confident. I mean, all signs point to “yes” on the magic 8 ball. But fuck, 2016 is still a fresh wound, even though Harris is not Hillary (much love to Hillary, but lots of baggage and a fake email scandal)
I hope being a way for a while, getting some quiet beach time, will reset my internal crisis mode.
BarcaChicago
I think we’ll win. And take back the House. I’m feeling good, with the usual election stress heightened by the stakes. I drove from Chicago early this morning to my hometown of Madison for the Obama/Walz rally. It’s filling up :-)) Great energy as we wait. Then lots of trips to Wisconsin for canvassing until Election Day!
Michael Bersin
Today is the first day of “no excuse” absentee voting (effectively, early voting) in Missouri. I stopped by the County Clerk’s office in the County Courthouse around 11:00 a.m. It’s the only early voting location in the county. There was a line, but it moved fairly quickly. You have to show an approved photo ID and sign two forms, one attesting that you won’t try to vote twice. I brought my U.S. Passport card for the photo ID, just because.
I voted straight Democratic ticket, one-by-one, skipped the races with just republican candidates, voted for abortion and reproductive rights (Amendment 3), voted “no” on sports betting and another gambling boat (Constitutional Amendments, don’t ask), against the retention of the two right wingnut Missouri Supreme Court Justices who voted against keeping Amendment 3 on this ballot, and “yes” for an initiative raising the minimum wage and requiring accumulated sick leave for workers. Everything else got a “no” from me.
RaflW
@Jerszy: Oddly, some percent of the infamous swing/undecided voters are most motivated to vote for “whoever the winner is gonna be”.
To that end, I get tired of the number of KamalaHQ emails I get that sound like things are bad. What swept me off my feet was going to that very first Milwaukee rally and the positive energy was so freakin’ great.
Yes, she said we were the underdogs in the fight. That’s fine! That’s fair. But it feels like we need a big injection of joy back into things. Not pollyana nonsense, but deep joy, abiding satisfaction that we are doing our level best and it will work (I think it will, but let’s SAY IT).
Chris
I don’t think I’ll ever be calm about another election in my life ever again.
But I find value in the Nick Fury Principle Of Crisis Response:
“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”
Anoniminous
@lowtechcyclist:
People don’t understand Statistics.
People really don’t understand Probability.
Anotherlurker
Strangely enough, I’m feeling calmer than I thought I would be at this point in this election cycle. I appreciate the work of all who GOTV.
TaMara
@Chris: ❤️
NotMax
@TaMara
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Great Prophet Zarquon.”
– Hitchhiker;s Guide to the Galaxy.
:)
terry chay
@ArchTeryx: Shrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment to show a paradox, similar to Maxwell’s Demon, not one to explain something. The difference is this paradox is currently unsolved.
The definition of a wave function collapse is that it has to interact with a classical body (observation) else wave states superpose, not collapse. But, every classical body should be a quantum mechanical one just at a large scale where the probabilities outside the primary one are so small as to be “deterministic.”
The Cat thought experiment directly ties the quantum mechanical world (decay of a radioactive particle), to the classical/observational one (cat living) and asks is the Cat alive or dead before WE observe it? It clearly must be one or the other and not a superposition of both, but that’s not what quantum mechanics says, hence the paradox.
We don’t know the answer. I suspect we never will because the nature of science is that we must observe it to be science. The thought experiments design asks us to step outside that restriction which science may not be able to do, like trying to find out what was on the other side the big bang, or what the force reunification energy is.
In the case of Maxwell’s Demon, we just needed to encompass the demon into the computation of energy and entropy and it was resolved (informational theory was a field that grew directly from this solution). I don’t see this sort of thing likely to happen here so it’s less likely a problem of failure of imagination/lack of experimentation and maybe just one for the philosophers and not us scientists.
Captain C
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Follow up headline the next day: “Democrats have won the Presidency and both houses of Congress in a surprise landslide victory. Here’s why they should follow the Trumpist agenda to the letter (except for the things to be done to us, the FTFNYT).”
Hungry Joe
I’m now EXTREMELY optimistic. As long as we keep pushing, up to the finish line and a step beyond the tape, we’ve got this.
In 2016, 1) Trump was seen — by SO many voters — as a successful billionaire businessman and entertaining TV star; 2) the Hillary Hate was off the charts; and 3) there was no hint of Dobbs. Trump is now a gibbering, downward-sliding buffoon, no one hates Kamala, and … Dobbs.
It’s not a sure thing, of course. But I’ve made myself stop contemplating What If; it does nothing but make me twitchy, anxious, miserable. There’s no point. It has been crammed into a box in the corner of my mind, to be tossed out Nov. 6. Meantime, I’m gearing up for some phone banking, and smiling every time I look at the stacks of 400 Postcards to Swing States, stamped and ready to mail on Thursday 10/24, as instructed.
KatKapCC
I am trying to be calm.
It is not easy
I wonder if we will ever get back to where each election didn’t feel like teetering on the precipice of doom.
geg6
@Baud:
Dang, that’s a big one.
Captain C
@TooManyJens:
I think it goes back to the Reagan landslides of the ’80s at least.
Jackie
BettyCracker, love hearing about the pups’ city life vacation!
I also agree with your optimism for Nov 5! 🤞🏻not to jinx anything!
As I, and others noted on the morning thread, something’s afoot. Harris going to Texas! Walz heading to Kentucky and Ohio! All five major newspapers in Texas endorsing Allred!
I’m “X-ing” off the days on my calendar to Nov 5th! I don’t know if we’ll have concrete evidence of victory that night, but I smell it! 🤞🏻🤞🏻
RaflW
More good news! “Judge Liman orders Rudy Giuliani to begin turning over assets within one week to satisfy the $146 million defamation judgment in favor of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss”
Kathleen
@narya: One of my cousins and her husband attended an event which celebrated a massive renovation of their high school in Casper, Wyoming. They were standing in a hallway when she saw Liz and Dick Cheney had walked in (Cheney also graduated from Casper High). She said there was no security, no muss, no fuss, and no one paid attention to them. She was horrified when her husband engaged Dick in an animated conversation (they’re both staunch Democrats). When she asked why she even talked to him he said he wanted to make sure Cheney understood how Federal money made the project possible.
They were both in the Peace Corps and her husband retired from Bureau of Land Management. Two beautiful souls who departed earth.
BeautifulPlumage
Also, dropped my ballot into the box this morning. I think we’ve got this. If Moldova can do it, so can we!
different-church-lady
I am also mysteriously calm and somewhat confident. My brain thinks this is irrational, but my emotions won’t play along.
SW
Calm as well. I feel we’ve done everything reasonable. We have a good candidate, well funded. What happens in two weeks is essentially a referendum on the electorate. Are the morons a majority? Well, let’s do a headcount and find out.
different-church-lady
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: You left out the “some Democrats worry” part.
KatKapCC
@narya: She’s still definitely a conservative Republican with whom you and I would probably disagree on many many issues. But what she has shown is that she has integrity and intellect and that she cares more about the country than about her party or herself. So I am okay with giving her recognition for that, while still knowing that for the most part I would detest her political views.
JCJ
@Baud: Now I have to watch that video from last election of that nutty “spiritual adviser” for Dump talking gibberish set to Eminem with a cat bopping to the beat…
NotMax
@KatKapCC
Did someone say calm?
;)
Captain C
@Betsy:
I really can’t understand the mentality which says that ‘things are fucked up and the Republicans are only going to make things worse, but the most important thing to do is teach the Democrats a lesson, not help trans people/Palestinians/poor people/pregnant people/&c. who I claim to care about.’
Unless, of course, punishing Democrats (or any other potential allies) is more important than actually making the world a better place.
Kathleen
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: “How this will doom Democrats in the 2026 midterms.”
Soprano2
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: That was entirely predictable; in the same way hired signature gatherers aren’t nearly as good as volunteers, because they’re motivated by money and will fake signatures to get more of it. It was super dumb for them to outsource their door knocking effort this way.
Chris
@narya:
It occurred to me recently that the Cheneys might be among the very few neocons who actually turned out to be what they presented themselves as.
People like them, all through the Cold War and all through the war on terror, cast foreign policy in World War Two terms, framing every enemy as New Hitler, and framing themselves as the heroic Churchills fighting to save the world and democracy from fascism. And there are times when this portrayal was truer than others, but people like me always took it with a big dose of cynicism, because everything we know about the hard right tells us that if the enemy actually was fascism, they wouldn’t be nearly as eager to fight it. Ever since it’s emerged, fascism has never had any trouble finding allies among “normal” conservatives, who with various degrees of overtness have constantly found ways to befriend it and weaponize it against the people they say are “the new fascists” (but, in reality, are at least as likely to be liberals who want civil liberties, workers and minorities who want to be treated like human beings, and third world populations who want a democracy, as they are to be communists and islamists). Even long before Trump came around, it was inconceivable to me that people like Bush and Cheney, if they were shown the world as it was in 1940, would actually turn out against Hitler, as opposed to blabbering some nonsense about how he’s not the nicest guy but without him we’d all be commies.
(Another popular line I heard from wingnut blogs in the 2000s was to compare the war on terror not just to WWII but to the Civil War, with Dubya liberating Iraq being just like Honest Abe freeing the slaves. Needless to say, the idea of these people being Abe Lincoln if they were given the chance was even more ridiculous than the idea of these people being Churchill or FDR).
And for the most part, my cynicism’s been very well justified, even more than I ever thought. The country’s descended into literal fascism complete with coups that threatened legislators’ lives and true believers going “Heil Trump,” and the response by almost every conservative has been, as I expected, to be totally okay with it. At worst, they pull a JD Vance and morph into the fascist’s biggest sycophants; at “best,” they pull a Mitt Romney and hem and haw about how Trump is a fascist but liberals talk about pronouns so both sides do it.
And yet somehow, among the very, very, very few conservatives who haven’t done that, and who have in fact turned out to be steadfastly against fascism at home, have been the Cheneys.
I admit, if you’d asked me to pick one conservative politician from all the 2000s and 2010s who’d turn out to be a real antifascist, I would not have picked either Cheney. Much like, if you’d asked me to pick which right-wing blogger from the early days would turn against his party on a point of principled antifascism, it would really really not have been Charles Johnson from Little Green Footballs. It’s almost enough to make you suspect that George Orwell was onto something when he said that the people who understood fascism the best were the ones who had a touch of it themselves.
Jeffro
Great post, BC, thank you!
For the first time in my adult life, I actually have a bottle of Pedialyte on hand. I’m going to need it on Nov 6th either way. =)
ArchTeryx
@PAM Dirac: You’re a whole lot better at math than I am and I tutored multivariate calculus! My actual thesis involved much simpler calculations, mostly Students t-Test and other statistical modeling. And a whole lot of just eyeballing and recording what I saw through a confocal microscope. Anything harder than what I did in an Excel spreadsheet went to a specialized statistics group.
Baud
@Captain C:
MAGA aren’t the only ones who are obsessed with owning the libs.
Melancholy Jaques
@lowtechcyclist:
Especially when he wins by about 80,000 votes out of a national total of about 129 million spread across three swing states. It was like a miracle of evil.
Torrey
@TaMara:
And Comey. Comey was a walking, talking (definitely talking, gawd help us!) lesson in HOW-NOT-TO-DO-IT, and, although many people have talked about how 2024 is different from 2016, he’s been getting a pass, in the sense of not being cited as among the people who gave us Trump.
Trollhattan
Worthless CA “flagship” paper remains worthless. Like, guys, this is a huuuurd choice?
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve LaBonne: TCFFG/PAB’s groundgame has been outsourced to grifters, like, you know, TCFFG/PAB. So it’s fail from top to bottom.
terry chay
By the way while the analogy of shroedingers cat is interesting it’s not what’s really going on. The difference people are expressing here is from the business world, not the scientific one: the difference between risk and uncertainty.
Businesses are good and set up to manage and mitigate the former, but sometimes the latter overwhelms and upends the models. They call those times (stock market crash, 2016 election when Comey goes public before polling can price it in to models), Black Swans.
In our case, the value of risk models is greatly diminish due to a number of factors: sea change in number and quality of people reachable by polling, news divisions becoming profit driven enterprises needing a narrative over the truth preventing pollsters from adjusting models after multiple election cycles, the known game theory manipulation of such models (via fake polls and betting markets), etc.
Because of this, this election is more uncertain than ever even if the model point out to a win and all the systematic errors only seem to be ones against against the most likely outcome (adjust for those errors would point to it being even more likely). But uncertainty doesn’t work that way because by definition, we are talking about things we have no way of measuring (else it would be risk).
This is why you can be both confident and have deep anxiety in this election. Probability of Trump winning is almost non existent (high confidence) but danger is so high that the risk (probability times cost) isn’t. However that risk is, itself, totally overwhelmed by uncertainty that we can’t even evaluate it as saying anything. We are in a nearly garbage-in-garbage-out state.
For me, I can only look at what the campaigns are doing as an indicator into data (internal polling coupled with canvassing and modeling) that we don’t have access to. Republicans wouldn’t be gaming betting markets and flooding polls: Trump would not be giving up sunbathing his “beautiful body” to serve french fries and say unhinged things on Twitter and at his tiny rallies; Harris would not be campaigning in Texas if this election had any of them thinking Trump was winning or had a path to victory.
Hops my confidence. Wont reduce my anxiety one bit. That’s the nature of uncertainty.
Baud
Via reddit, hopium.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@different-church-lady:
Heh heh, that’s why I’m not the Pitchbot.
ArchTeryx
@terry chay: Now that’s some hard science, way beyond my ken. I actually ran away from physical chemistry at maximum warp and ended up in a much more qualitative science, molecular biology of viruses.
It’s actually soothing to me to read and learn more about things. I consider stuff like this priceless. Thank you. terry chay. You helped a lot.
Soprano2
I’m as calm as I can be about the election, I’ve got things closer to home to worry about. Hubby’s still in the hospital; his test numbers are slowly getting better. I called the hematologists’ office today because they never responded to my message; she said the doctor was going to come over to talk “to us” this afternoon. I told her I might not be there, because I’ve learned that it’s a waste of my time to spend hours in the hospital waiting for five minutes with the doctor. They can call me after they see him to update me if I’m not there. I’ve got to take my cat to the vet this afternoon (I’ve already cancelled that appointment once), and then I’ll go to the hospital. Looks like we’re going to get some medical home care again when he’s discharged, which is OK with me. I’ll be glad a physical therapist is coming to work with him again, those exercises might need to be updated. I’m trying to be calm about it because there isn’t anything I can do to change it.
RandomMonster
I’m relatively calm, but RandomMrs is anxious about the prospect of violence around the elections. I try to reassure her with the thought that an awful lot of Republicans are blowhards who talk a lot about violence and civil wars but don’t have values or the guts to fight for them. Still, there’s always the prospect of some weirdo doing something…
Jackie
This is a first! And a great way to spend a bit of those billion dollars!
Melancholy Jaques
@Anoniminous:
And as a result, Las Vegas.
Suzanne
While I was out of the country for the last couple of weeks….. it was so nice to not think about that orange piece of shit.
I will note that there is a lot of propaganda imagery posted in Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, etc. of al-Sisi. I spoke with about five locals about it and they all hated al-Sisi. And they specifically cited Trump referring to him as “my favorite dictator”.
Belafon
@Captain C: It requires believing two things:
Torrey
Also, Betty, thank you for this post. It’s good to hear from you and know that the Cracker family has found a safe haven. One thing I’d like to hear about, perhaps after this is over and people are back in place–those who have a place to be back in–is how folks managed to find places to be, despite the massive evacuations. One would think that there would hardly be an empty location (or a non-full-to-the-rafters one) anywhere within driving distance.
Suzanne
Oh, and I will note….. I’m anxious as hell and I have to go to Florida next week. I feel like I’m gonna be contaminated.
lowtechcyclist
Betty, I’m glad to hear that you and Bill and the doggos have found a manageable place to live while you wait for the waters to go down.
I’ve been pretty much on an even keel throughout this, including during the whole “Biden’s old and needs to step aside” crap. (Still waiting for them to beat that drum about Trump with the same fervor.) I’ve paid very little attention to the polls, and throughout most of this, I’ve never really had much sense of who’s up and who’s down.
I think it’s much more likely that we win than that we lose, but at the same time I can’t deny that there’s a real chance that we lose. So I’ve been starting to think more seriously about that lately. Short version: my family and I aren’t leaving, and I’m not going to arm myself. Others will do as they feel they should, and I would not criticize anyone who chooses differently. I hope that those who are at much greater risk than we are if Trump wins can get out while the getting’s good.
But logistically, most of us would have to stay. If half of the 340 million Americans want to leave, the rest of the world just isn’t going to absorb 170 million refugees. We’ll each have to figure out whether we resist or whether we just keep our heads down, and there’s the question of what sort of resistance will be possible, and that depends on just how things play out. There’s so much we can’t anticipate.
Baud
@Belafon:
A more superficially plausible although still fanciful theory before 2016. Today that’s just sociopathic.
KatKapCC
@Baud: I would bet that for every one Republican who openly declares their support for Harris, there are a dozen or so more who are supporting her silently. I could snipe at them for not being brave enough, but…
RaflW
The thing I take from Liz Cheney is that unlike a lot of back bencher (and some top tier) Republicans, she’s refused to be intimidated by her party’s base voters. She knows they’re armed, their anger has been stoked for far too many years, that the death threats – while 99.x% junk – contain just enough risk to be troublesome.
She shows up every lily livered coward like Mitt Romney. Not a man I respected before, anyway. But I sure get ‘panic room’ vibes from him. Liz? Not letting any fear control her effort to try to wrest control back from the lunatics.
She’s horribly conservative. I loathe her policies and probably would find her personally a bit unpleasant. But whatever. Keep contrasting yourself to chinless twerps like Lindsey Graham, ma’am.
BubbaDave
@Chris: It has also not escaped my notice that most of the other neocons who stayed NeverTrump — Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot — are Jewish and so had extra reason to doubt that the candidate of the
neo-Nazisalt-right (I can’t believe I was almost uncivil!) was an acceptable choice. Cheney had the option of embracing Trump in a way that Jewish neocons didn’t, and she rejected that option.She’s still my opponent, and likely always will be, but she’s not my enemy. And in 2024, that’s enough.
Steve LaBonne
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, that’s why I’m very confident that our GOTV is massively superior. And that’s going to make a meaningful, maybe decisive difference.
Villago Delenda Est
Not that much unlike our own John Cole, who finally reached a point where he said “enough of this shit!”
Jackie
He’s still exhausted from working the fry machine for 15 mins:
Chris
@Torrey:
Comey somehow managed the spectacular achievement of being a worse FBI director than J. Edgar Hoover, which until 2016 was almost as unreachable a standard as being a worse James Bond than George Lazenby.
As horrific and corrupt as Hoover was, even he never had the ego to try and tip the scales of a presidential election. Let alone tip the scales to a candidate that our number one foreign enemy had expressed a preference for.
ArchTeryx
@BubbaDave: The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, but an ally of convenience. However, when you’re in the trenches exchanging artillery fire, you need all the allies you can get. Worry about fighting them later. For now we have a war to win and they’re in OUR trenches, not theirs.
Captain C
@Belafon:
@Baud:
I think there’s a third thing that applies to certain members of the Very Online Left, and that’s “Under Republicans my trust fund won’t get taxed as much and besides, I can probably pass as the Right Kind of Person.” Fucking Cosplay Revolutionaries with trust funds.
ArchTeryx
@Captain C: It actually shocked me that some of these people were transgendered, and were busy spreading poison about the Democratic party. They sure seemed to want to poison people’s opinion about the Ds a whole lot more than worry about what TCFG would do to them if they actually executed Project 2025.
Some of these people are just as solipsistic as the MAGAts. The leopards won’t eat their faces, so they aren’t worried about anyone else, because the Democrats would sell all trans people down the river for a bag of corn chips. *sighs*
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
I wasn’t around for that. Only discovered this blog in 2010 or so. I’m glad I never knew Cole in his asshole phase.
ETA: also to be fair to Cole, I believe he’s specifically said that as much as he regrets his old politics, he was never nearly as vile as Johnson used to be.
And I believe it. I remember being conservative-leaning for all of a couple years when I was a dumb teenager, who still had a lot to learn about the world and was all hopped up on 9/11 zeitgeist and too many Tom Clancy novels. Looking at right wing politics today is a never-ending whiplash between “oh, I remember when I was that far gone,” and “yeah, I’m sorry, but I was never that far gone, and even fifteen-year-old-me could have told you that the only appropriate answer to something like this was to vote Democrat.”
BubbaDave
@ArchTeryx: Exactly. We’ll be fighting her later if we win, but it will be with ballots and arguments and persuasion. If we lose, those weapons may no longer be available to us. So until Trump is defeated, we’ve got room in the big tent for Cheney and for Jeff Flake and for any other Republican who actually wants a Republic.
RaflW
@lowtechcyclist: As an out gay couple, and with a partner who has preached multiple sermons on anti-authoritarianism, including one that won a national award, we’re well into the mental preparations.
We haven’t done much to actually prepare, but I have mental checklists and plans in mind. We will not waste time on deciding if we need to go, but trust that the months between an unfavorable election result and Jan 20th will be sufficient to at least secure some safety.
And a big part of the plan is how to keep the ladder in place for others for as long as possible (ie: planning mutual aid resources and knowing who trusted partner orgs are) if it’s needed.
If it’s not? It’s all just been a depressing mental project and we can shelve it. Of course part of what’s exhausting is that guys like JDV, Josh Hawley etc are not going away anytime in my lifetime, probably.
(I think about a Swedish cousin’s wife, who managed to get out of Czechoslovakia. She couldn’t see her brother for decades, nor many friends, and it pained her greatly. But she valued her bodily autonomy and liberty, and yep, that’s me too, if needed).
ArchTeryx
@BubbaDave: We did it with Josef Stalin in WWII. He was every bit as bad as Hitler, Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito, and he had a higher body count than the three of them combined. But we allied with him long enough to beat the Nazis into the ground and worried about Stalin and the USSR later. Most of all, we stood aside and let the Russians invade Berlin, and they absolutely wanted blood after Stalingrad. They were motivated to fight in our trenches, so we let ’em have at it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: Cole is, by his own admission, still a bit of a misanthrope, but his love for dogs, and cats, and his new bride mitigate a lot of that!
HumboldtBlue
lowtechcyclist
@TooManyJens:
I imagine myself in that room, trying and failing to keep my laughter under wraps, while everyone around me looks at me strangely.
lowtechcyclist
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
The GOP should be renamed Griftway, the multi-level grifting enterprise.
Tinare
This being a truly misogynistic country is what makes me sweat. Or maybe it’s just that I have PTSD from 2016 when I was sure Hillary would win. Such a small margin the wrong is all it will take and that is what gives me the night terrors.
Splitting Image
@Captain C:
There is a Doonesbury strip where one of the characters is analyzing the Mondale defeat in ’84 and hyperventilating to the thought of waking up one day and finding the country being run by Newt Gingrich.
I think he captured the zeitgeist of liberalism in the mid-80s pretty well.
lowtechcyclist
@Chris:
I’m gonna have to remember this one.
stinger
We have: Black women, Swifties, Springsteen, Eminem, both Obamas, Liz Cheney, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris.
They have: disappearing pets, damp sofa cushions, swaying to Ave Maria, over-salted french fries.
I’m optimistic.
ArchTeryx
@Splitting Image: Garry Trudeau anonymously contributed to the Stop Project 2025 comic project. He can be found here:
stopproject2025comic.org/
Villago Delenda Est
@RaflW: I want to know what happens to Oozy if he fails to comply with the order.
Baud
@stinger:
They have the NYT.
beckya57
@Kosh III: my mother told me about a cat in Kansas City in her youth. Whenever a new dog moved into the neighborhood the cat would wait until the dog walked by. The cat would then jump on the dog, dig in his claws, and go for a ride. The dogs left him STRICTLY alone after that. 😹.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Baud:
I think “damp sofa cushions” covers that base.
A word of comfort to those who are still having nightmares about 2016 – one thing which I do not see being mentioned in analysis is that 2016 was an attempt by the Dems to continue holding the White House after 8 years already with a Democratic President. Getting 3 consecutive terms with the same party in the WH is not unheard of (Reagan – Reagan – GHB, and before that FDR – FDR – FDR – FDR – Truman) but it is a hard lift. More often, the American electorate gets tired of the same party in the WH and after 2 terms is in the mood for a change election which favors the challenging party.
We will have to deal with that heavy lift in 2028, but that’s a problem for us four years from now to worry over, not now. Which is an indirect way of saying that I think we are going to win this year, by a margin too large for even Fox News in Pinstripes (the NYT) to ignore.
lowtechcyclist
@RaflW:
Sweet!
Jackie
TCFG’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery is being investigated just in time to push it back into voters minds:
Scout211
Good. Every charge, every conviction, every sentence and every appeal denied is another warning for future insurrectionists when Trump loses again.
lowtechcyclist
@KatKapCC:
Assuming we get through this election OK, I’d love to sit down with her, thank her for all she’s done these past two years, and then enjoy arguing with her about everything under the sun, now that it was settled for at least another four years that we’d continue to be a democracy.
Manyakitty
@Jackie: MSNBC just said he’s scheduled for an interview with Joe Rogan on Friday. We’ll see what happens by Friday.
Jackie
@Scout211: Agreed.
Maybe The Lincoln Project should run ads showing TCFG’s insurrectionists found guilty and their asses hauled off to jail with their jail sentences noted.
Citizen Alan
@Captain C: The most conservative person in my life who I consider a friend is the guy who runs our D&D group. He is the 26yo gay, adopted son of a financial planner who really, really likes guns (both the son and the father). Everyone else in our gaming group is fairly liberal so he stays quiet about it and he’s not a dick about it, but it’s clear that when group discussion veers liberal he gets visibly uncomfortable. None of us have outright discussed who we’re voting for, though I’m certain everyone else is voting Dem except for one guy who doesn’t see the point of voting in Fresno, California (completely blue at the state level; completely red at the county level).
Kirk
My other half and I voted today – Dallas, TX. 8:30 am. There was a slight line that stayed about 2-5 people deep from when we got there to when we left.
I find that kind of encouraging, actually, having been to more than one mid-week early voting session where she and I were the only two voters on premises.
TBone
@Scout211: that is most excellent news! ☺️
Baud
@Manyakitty:
Interesting. Harris people had been talking about going on Rogan.
Old School
@ArchTeryx:
Which one is Trudeau?
TBone
@Jackie: 💙👍
Melancholy Jaques
@Tinare:
I have the same PTSD, but I am wondering if the country might be less misogynistic than it was eight years ago.
Also, it wasn’t just misogyny that defeated Hillary Clinton. It was more than 20 years of negative press. They haven’t had time to do that to Harris. And – saints be praised – it doesn’t look like they are trying to do that.
Manyakitty
@Baud: she should. Hoping she already did. It’s too big an audience to ignore.
Jackie
@Manyakitty: Friday gives TCFG three days for extra bed rest 😉
Aziz, light!
I’d like to see some messaging aimed at the various non-cult Kamala naysayers to the effect of “You don’t have to like Harris to stop Trump.”
It might win votes, reluctant or otherwise, from Republicans who need to justify not pulling the lever for R as usual or who fear the flak they would get from friends or family for supporting Harris; from lefties unhappy about Israel but still sane enough to know what Trump would do instead; from black men who don’t want to vote for a woman or who buy the “Kamala is a cop” line; from anyone who doesn’t like Trump but bases their public persona on their “independent” bonafides.
It won’t sway any of the MAGA faithful, or the usual lefties who want to destroy the Democratic Party to usher in a progressive paradise, or Israel-incensed lefties screaming “Killer Kamala,” or fundy Christians who believe Trump was sent by God to bring about the end times, or the worst of the racists and misogynists. But it might elicit votes from more reasonable people who feel they need to justify to themselves or others a departure from their usual voting behavior.
Manyakitty
@Jackie: lol or time for additional decompensation.
Baud
@Manyakitty:
She has not been on yet.
SatanicPanic
Same. Not stressed. I’m pretty sure we’re going to win but if we don’t there’s nothing I can do right now to prepare for a Trump presidency. And my thoughts on apocalypse have always been- die at the beginning, not the end.
Jackie
@Aziz, light!: I believe that’s what Liz Cheney and several other Republicans for Harris are currently doing.
Kirk
@beckya57:
When my family moved to Goodland, KS, our dog and cat tag-teamed the neighborhood dogs. Ginger (the dog) would range around as bait, then when the other dogs got territorial would haul ass back to our yard. We had a smallish tree with a fairly sturdy branch about four feet off the ground. From which, as Ginger ran under, Boots would launch herself and imitate a bull rider with one paw on the nose, one upside the head, and the two back ones firmly on the flanks – all claws extended. The pursuit noises would turn to pained panicked yelps, the dog would leave the yard at full gallop, and Boots would drop off as the end of the yard was reached. She’d do a quick reverse back to the branch, and the one time I saw a dog reverse Ginger hit it from the rear and put it to flight. By the end of a month we had no other animals coming into our yard.
My old ass still giggles with the glee my 8 year old self felt at having such protection on site.
sab
@RaflW: My husband is a crazy cat gentleman. I wear a lot of cat themed shirts because he thinks they are funny because he knows I am more dog.
Every time I go out in a cat shirt ( grocery, hardware store, bank) a new to me woman comes over and announces that she too is a single or childless cat lady. JD Vance offended a big demographic. Childless cat ladies may be childless by choice, by circumstance, or by unfortunate biology, but we love our cats and many of us are okay with our lives. And apparently we have some solidarity. Who knew.
My pitbull is herself a childless cat lady. But she can’t vote.
Suzanne
@Melancholy Jaques:
Um, I think it’s more misogynistic. I think the difference is that more women know it this year.
Melancholy Jaques
@lowtechcyclist:
I would love to see a video ad showing how Rudy, Jenna, Sydney, and other lawyers went to court to lie for Trump, how they have be ruined by it, and how he has done nothing to help them.
Part of the “he only cares about himself” theme.
tobie
In our media-saturated, outrage-addled age, calm, commitment and optimism don’t tend to get registered in the news, but they are definitely there, and I’d rather perk my ears up for them than for voices on bullhorns. Thanks for posting this, Betty Cracker.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Melancholy Jaques:
We’ve discussed this aspect of it before and it’s always good to raise it again. Getting baggage to “stick” takes a gazillion years, the the right-wing-noise-machine had decades to do that to Clinton which in turn tilted the playing field. The fact she decisively still won the popular vote in itself was an accomplishment.
Obama didn’t have that since he too burst onto the national political scene close enough to the election. Same thing with Harris.
As someone pointed out above, having Harris run now instead of in 2028 (for the first time) is probably an advantage given how the electorate seemingly wants to toss out the party after 8 years.
Of course the Obama Reaction could happen: we had a BLACK WOMAN!!!!! in there and we can’t have that long term! JFC.
Jackie
The Texas Tribune has updated Harris’ Texas visit to say she’ll be rallying with Allred.👍🏻
texastribune.org/2024/10/22/kamala-harris-texas-visit-houston-rally/
Manyakitty
@Baud: I’m utterly unfamiliar with his show. Any idea how long he holds interviews before he plays them? (And as far as I know, she hasn’t finalized anything with him yet, but a girl can hope)
rikyrah
I just voted!!
Took me 20 minutes (which is long for them. )
I did choke up when I saw
KAMALA D. HARRIS
TIM WALZ
On my ballot.
This is the first time that Chicago can elect its School Board.
The only person that I knew I wasn’t going to vote for was the woman who was pro Charter Schools. I made sure to research the candidates.
Manyakitty
@sab: but I wish she could!
Mousebumples
Agreed. It’s at least as misogynistic. And I’m way more aware and calling things out when I see them.
Manyakitty
@rikyrah: admittedly, I also had a moment when I saw that. Then I double, triple, and quadruple checked to make sure I marked the right oval.
Omnes Omnibus
@TooManyJens: What’s wrong with being confident?
Capri
Two things i heard recently make me optimistic. The first is the fact that support for Trump from white women is down 5-6 points, and white women are the largest voting block. If he lost in 2020, how can he expect to win now with less support from the largest group of voters?
Second was an interaction I witnessed on a recent flight to Dallas. There were a group of older white guys bro-ing it up at the gate. A women joined their group because, in her words, it sounded like a party. After some discussion she told them that she had recently moved from Mass. to Texas. They went on about how she must be happy that she was now free in politcally incorrect Texas rather than communist Massachusetts. She replied “I’m not free now, I can’t get an abortion.” That shut them up.
I don’t think men get what the Dobb’s decision has done to women’s perspectives.
KatKapCC
@lowtechcyclist: Agree! I imagine she would actually be a good person to have a debate with. She’s smart, she’s quick-thinking, but she’s also not a wild-eyed wacko and I think is someone you might be able to find a tiny patch of common ground with on certain things.
Mousebumples
In personal election news – the Mouse House voted absentee by mail (*dropbox) ~10 days ago. Great to vote for so many women on my ballot for the top 3 lines – President, Senator, House Representative.
I’m mailing my 300 Postcards to Swing States for Wisconsin today. A few days early but early in person voting started today, and I want to get those in the mail.
I am feeling 2016 PTSD, but I’m honestly confident. Just… scared.
We’re putting in the work. I hope it translates to an MVP victory.
H.E.Wolf
@Manyakitty: “@rikyrah: admittedly, I also had a moment when I saw that. Then I double, triple, and quadruple checked to make sure I marked the right oval.”
Triple-checked here too. Gave their names a little kiss before I put my ballot in the mailing envelope. :)
And then I walked to the post office and mailed my vote with profound and solemn joy. This is history we’re making.
ArchTeryx
@Old School: Lucy the transgender.woman. The style is unmistakable.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
More women are willing to admit it, because they know what to look for.
I am one of those women who underestimated the misogyny that Hillary faced in 2016.
Baud
If we win, one reason is because we failed in 2016 IMHO.
jonas
Well, BC, if after everything you’ve been through this year, you can feel positive about the next two weeks, then dammit, so can I! Excelsior!
rikyrah
@RaflW:
RaflW
October 22, 2024 at 1:30 pm
CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP
Doc Sardonic
@Suzanne: Don’t eat the ice……
JaySinWA
@Villago Delenda Est: What are the options of court penalties or enforcement for defying that order? IIRC judgements that aren’t paid often end up with collection agencies.
Tony Jay
@rikyrah:
Spreading themselves a bit thin, aren’t they? When will they ever find the time to President/Vice President?
sab
OT: Is it just me, or Google, or Spectrum, or are others finding the internet incredibly slow today? I just watch that little circle turning…turning…turning.
Villago Delenda Est
@ArchTeryx: Here I thought it was the “Extreme Weather” panel. But that top left one definitely shows signs of the Trudeau style.
Trollhattan
In the spirit of “breathe, damnit!” Digby has a post highlighting a piece by an Obama data guy who believes we’re not about to repeat 2016. An excerpt, excerpt.
And from Digby’s closer.
RTWT. digbysblog.net/2024/10/22/are-we-gonna-be-ok/
Old School
@ArchTeryx: Thanks.
CaseyL
I’m sending out my last batch of postcards today (for a Congressional race that doesn’t have early voting).
My mental state is… strange. I have bouts of anxiety, depression, and anger but mostly my mind is kind of mush. I can’t think very deeply or in a very focused way about anything complicated. I actually don’t know if the cause is the election, or a very delayed bit of Long Covid. I guess we’ll see after November 5.
I’d like us to win and not only for the obvious reasons: it would be nice to find out that 50% of the voting public are not irredeemable moral and mental nitwits.
Ocotillo
@Kirk: Bexar County (San Antonio) had 46,000 turn out yesterday for early voting, a new record. Harris county had 125,000. The polling site where I work some had 1,800. In 2020, there was a day or two that saw 2,400 but those were end of early voting days that are 12 hours long instead of 10. Fingers crossed.
lowtechcyclist
@Villago Delenda Est:
I concur. The woman in that one has Doonesbury eyes.
Omnes Omnibus
As I said again and again during the Dump Biden fiasco, I will panic when Black women panic.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
They never panic.
sab
@rikyrah: In my town we have always elected the school board. The last two times we really, really fucked it up. Good luck.
We didn’t get the weird RWNJs, just some morons. One of their number is a ProLife public school nurse whom they elected to be the head. She knows nothing about finance, very little about teaching, and she hates to offend people. Due to her and their prior incompetence we are now paying for two former then fired school superintemdants, a new superintendant from Arkansas who turns out to be a union buster who is trying to reinstate segregatimg all special needs kids back into separate classrooms.
We are facing a huge deficit and a new school bond issue that will cost me and spouse $1500 a year. I have never in my life voted against a school bond issue and I didn’t this time but I sure was tempted this time.
My granddaughter is ten, autistic, two years behind but happily acclimated to a class of the same ( mostly neurotypical) kids since kindergarten, but this year the school stuck her in a separate class with “those kids” (quote from the teacher of her former classmates) so she sees nome of her friends and classmates from the past three years. We are incandescent with rage but mostly helpless, although her mom is not a passive person.
So be careful what you wish for and get your friends and neighbors to keep an eye on them. Most voters focus on the top of the ballot but it’s the bottom of the ballot issues that matter in your family’s life.
UncleEbeneezer
Some Hopium (or at least, talk yourself off a ledge, calming words):
1.) Chris Bouzy sees real trouble for the GOP in FL based on early, in-person ballot returns. Dems are outperforming in 57 of 67 counties and the GOP lead is only 90K (many of which, could be for Harris). And there’s a significant (20% I think) amount of NPA ballots. He thinks 90K more GOP ballots considering how many more registered Republicans are in the state, is actually a significant GOP underperformance.
2.) Dana Houle thinks the Harris campaign sounds confident that while the election will be very close, they have a good plan with the right targets and approach, to win it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Correct.
SatanicPanic
@Omnes Omnibus: was it really a fiasco? I would definitely not be confident if Biden were still running.
Another Scott
@Chris: She walks the talk.
Her PAC is Our Great Task:
Her PAC has raised around $20M total in the 2022 and 2024 cycles.
Not sure what’s she’s spent the money on, but she’s doing the work. As you say, it’s impressive that she’s burned so many bridges to do what she (and we) think is right here.
Cheers,
Scott.
narya
@sab: Yeah, me too.
Omnes Omnibus
@SatanicPanic: Yes, it was.
sab
@SatanicPanic: I agree with you although I love Biden. I never say that out loud at home because my husband is still furious.
Biden on foreign policy was often awful but Trump was so much worse.
zhena gogolia
@SatanicPanic: No, you are not going to get people to agree with you about this. Just stop.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, that’s no fun.
Dave
@Chris: I think that say what you will about the Cheney’s that they aren’t cowards and have enough awareness to recognize the only version of the US they would really be at any sort of risk is one that has gone full fascist or if you make a distinction kleptocracy.
The most righteous left curtail the excesses of wealth US that is at all reasonably possible is at most going to raise their taxes and constrain some of their potential influences and that is about it.
Marmot
@Ocotillo: That’s great! I was curious, so I looked up the Austin area.
46,600+ on the first day for Travis County
27,000 for Williamson County (historically very conservative, but moving in the right direction)
And this area has a smaller population than San Antonio!
sab
@sab: My husband hasn’t forgiven but I accept that politics is a contact sport not for the faint hearted, and just win baby (without abandoning your principles. Biden did that, Bill Clinton quite frankly failed, which hurt his wife’s campaign.)
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: Wherever anyone came out on the question of Biden stepping down, that month was a shitshow.
Alice
Early voted in Nevada this morning! I feel optimistic and uplifted. (Bummed there was no bake sale, though.)
Kamala is going to win!
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: Whatever, here we are with Kamala Harris who is amazing.
I don’t think the dump Biden people realized how tight those two are, which was stupid on their part. Biden only knew about her from Beau.
Marmot
@Ocotillo:
Also, what the heck is with Houston (Harris County)? It’s so hilariously lame, turnout-wise. At a fraction of its size, the Austin area contributed an approximately equal number of net-Dem votes in 2020.
My joke about it is “I like Houston. It’s got potential.”
Edit: added “in 2020.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Melancholy Jaques: I comfort myself by remembering that HRC got more votes. She won the popular vote. So the voters were ready for a woman president. The EC wasn’t.
sab
@sab: Not really, but she was only another new Senator. Beau knew her as a fellow attorney general.
We lost a lot when Beau Biden died.
Chris
@Dave:
That’s an absolutely shocking display of awareness, though, coming from the ringleader of the crowd whose Iraq policy was “we believe that a totally unregulated free-for-all kleptocracy is True Freedom and will totally create a healthy functioning modern middle-class democracy just like Germany and Japan.”
Maybe the fact that it’s actually happening in his own country is enough of a difference to focus him.
(Or we could all be wrong: it might just be that this whole mess comes down to sheer spite. That’s what it was for John McCain. But then McCain only cut loose because he was literally at death’s door and didn’t have reelection, or anything, to worry about anymore. The Cheneys aren’t that).
SatanicPanic
@Omnes Omnibus: I thought it proceeded as smoothly as reasonably possible. I don’t think the decision was panic-driven. That would imply that no one was thoughtfully considering possible negative outcomes. But maybe we’re just arguing semantics.
@sab: all of Trump’s recent losing his marbles would be totally ignored. We’d be so doomed.
Nelle
@Melancholy Jaques: Well, if he knew precisely how many votes he needed from Georgia in 2020, did someone on his staff know precisely how many he needed in 2016 and he got some help with that? Otherwise, I do have to believe in the random triumph of evil. Maybe I should, anyway.
hrprogressive
@lowtechcyclist:
Who said that?
Sites were saying “>99% Hillary Wins”.
Also, a 70/30 chance of a Trump Loss, and the 30% is what comes to pass is…I mean, I’d call that a “polling miss”.
Be different if it had been 51/49.
Kayla Rudbek
@Wapiti: one of my chemistry professors mixed up some ammonium triiodide and put it on his front lawn to discourage a particular dog from doing its business there…
SatanicPanic
@Chris: I’ve been saying this for years- the left was far too cynical in claiming the neocons were chasing oil. In fact neocons were mostly sincere if deranged and misguided believers in democracy. They believe in neoliberalism and don’t care much if minorities don’t get to vote, but they do basically agree that democracy is better than any alternative. MAGA most definitely doesn’t believe that- they want dictatorship. That’s why neocons are disproportionately represented among never Trumpers.
Dan B
@Citizen Alan: Its mind boggling to me, a gay guy who lived through the McCarthy era, and other eras of harsh repression and plague, that a gay guy could embrace MAGA. Trump and the current GOP owe Christian Nationalists big time. While the “dreaded immigrants” are being herded into camps the Christianists will be removing LGBTQ people from jobs and homes. They will fan the flames of hatred. They see The Handmaid’s Tale as an instruction manual. They may not go as far as publicly crucifying LGBTQ people but in private is likely. Christianists believe in demons. A 26 year old into D&D is high up the list.
Ksmiami
@SatanicPanic: my thoughts are being down as many of the enemy as possible first
Manyakitty
@zhena gogolia: this.
SatanicPanic
@Ksmiami: I can get behind that too
sab
@SatanicPanic: Agreed
sab
@sab: Called Spectrum and they fixed ot in about 1 minute. Good for them but where were they all afternoon.
stinger
@Baud:
And they can have it.
Chris
@SatanicPanic:
Yeah. My read is that the pure neocons, at least the foreign policy ones, are basically the shallowest and most big-picture focused people in politics. They see politics on a grand and global scale where they’re always looking for the next WWII like crusade and their ideologies are defined in as big and vague terms as “liberal democracy good, totalitarian dictatorship bad.” Basically, their politics are those of the average classic WWII movie.
That means they have very little appreciation for the nitty gritty details of domestic politics and just what kind of liberal democracy, and what we mean by liberal democracy, we’re talking about – both in terms of American domestic politics, and in terms of the politics of rebuilding occupied countries.
Their domestic political views are based on identifying which party are the heroic unflinching Churchillian promoters of democracy and which are the treasonous Quislings and cowardly Chamberlains. For most of their adult lives, Republicans have been the former and Democrats have been the latter. They don’t really think about what the two parties stand for beyond that. Therefore, they trust Republicans, and are perfectly happy to see a bunch of Heritage Foundation interns unleashed on Iraqi reconstruction. They don’t see the difference between these people and their Grover Norquist ideology versus the New Dealer ideology of those who rebuilt Germany and Japan, largely because that would require them caring and learning about stuff that they find too boring to focus on.
The flip side of all this is that something on the scale of Trump’s betrayal is something they, or at least a fair number of them, can understand and be horrified by. Trump is selling out a friendly democracy that they’ve long been hoping to see in the U.S. orbit, he’s threatening to dismantle the alliance that’s the cornerstone of U.S. power projection in Eurasia, and he’s clearly in bed with one of the two things they’ve always considered the Great Satan. That’s hard to let slide. Perversely, the fact that they’re so disconnected from the nitty-gritty of U.S. politics is an advantage in this case. The average Republican voter will forgive Trump anything because of how he hates immigrants and trans people, but that stuff does nothing for the neocons. (Less because they care about the immigrants and trans people, and more because their idea of identity politics is less “white men versus transgender Mexicans,” and more “America/the West versus Russia/China.”)
SatanicPanic
@Chris: I think this is the correct read on them
Torrey
@sab:
Please, please, please tell me there is a t-shirt that says “My pitbull is a childless cat lady.”
PST
In the immortal words of Mrs. Lovett, “them pussy cats is quick.” No worries on that score.
dnfree
@zhena gogolia: Some people agree with Satanic Panic and others agree with you and others are somewhere between. That’s okay.
wjca
I know it’s a dead thread by now, but I gotta say this.
The country is NOT more misogynistic now than it the past. It’s less. Has been getting less and less for decades — I remember the 50s and early 60s.
What has changed is that the remaining misogynists (and, no question, there are still a lot of them) are out and loud. We can argue what the cause of that is. Maybe they feel Trump’s blatant misogyny somehow gives them “permission” to do so. Maybe they feel more threatened, because women are increasingly visible in prominent positions. Maybe the women in their lives (especially their daughters?; kids, you know) have started calling them out on it.
But being louder doesn’t increase their numbers. Obnoxious as it is.
Another Scott
@wjca: +1
My mom was a secretary/bookkeeper at a small office supply distributor in Atlanta when I was growing up in the mid-late-60s. We went with her to work on occasional weekends when she had to get caught up on stuff. The conference room had a big fancy table with a dozen or so big fancy puffy chairs. And the walls were adorned with a dozen or more literal framed Playboy centerfolds.
And it was the most normal thing in the world.
We have made a lot of progress in the last 40-50-60 years. But more always remains to be done. We have to keep working to make things better.
Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
wjca
@Another Scott:
Agree completely. Still lots to be done. I just find it irritating when “progressives” seem
reluctant toincapable of recognizing that progress, substantial progress, has been made. And within living memory.